phone

Acer has unveiled a double 7-inch whammy today. The Acer Iconia One 7 might yet be another entry level tablet for the budget market, but the Iconia Tab 7 adds a bit of telephony into the pot, making it a large, and awkward, phablet.

There is no doubt that Android is almost everywhere, powering a wide variety of smart devices ranging from the usual suspects of smartphones and tablets to the more multimedia-centric boxes and TVs. Android has even appeared in some traditional landline situations, as an add-on tablet, a dedicated cordless home phone, or, in this case, a fixed display for an office phone. Make no mistake, though, as Cisco's DX650 phone is all about business and very little about entertainment.

Lately we've heard a few reports that Google and Dish were in talks to launch their own Google wireless service, something that would be amazing. Today however it looks like Google's been looking into offering their own phone services before, but those plans have all since been axed and canceled. Below are a few comments from Google's own VP Milo Medin, who was speaking on the matter.

Today while browsing the interwebs I stumbled across a neat story from New York City. Since everyone these days walks around with a smartphone attached to their faces or hands, the need for a payphone is steadily declining. With payphone booths set up all across cities in the US we might as well make use out of them. In New York City they are doing exactly that -- making them WiFi hotspots for all.

Virgin Mobile has just outed a new no contract pre-paid plan options for those folks who don't need a top-tier smartphone but still love to talk and text. Announcing the new Virgin Mobile pre-paid PayLo plan offers unlimited talk and text, with 50 MB of data (web access) for $40 monthly. While the deal sounds decent this is more for feature phones that have web access, not a smartphone running Android.

Sometimes it's hard to realize a good idea until you've seen it in action. And to be honest, I was a bit skeptical of the 'two devices, one data plan' idea for some time. But the ASUS PadFone seems flawless; well, it does in their advertisement so I guess there's some bias there. Either way, be sure to check out 1:38 in the video clip when they show how the included stylus doubles as a bluetooth headset!

Today I have a little treat for you all to cap off the day. This is a beautiful and extremely well designed concept phone from an XDA member by the name of Jason Wang. He is not one of the very well known concept designers but I have a feeling after everyone starts to see this latest creation he will be. This is about as clean and elegant as a phone could come.

Vizio is a popular brand, and although it's not considered "The Golden Standard" by many, they are some of the best TVs around at the best prices. Vizio is set to unveil its first Android phone and tablet, both based on Android, ahead of CES.

The lack of support from everyone involved with this phone has been the focal point of many people losing faith in Samsung. It’ll probable never see Android 2.0+ even though there is a petition going around to make this happen. Regardless, we are hearing word that the OTA to 1.6 has started to arrive on a few Behold ll’s.
Android 1.6 offers a whole world of possibilities for the Behold ll. along with this update to 1.6, Samsung is including Google Voice, Google Maps with navigation as well as the Swype keyboard. There are other various bug fixes thrown in also. Even with these extra goodies being tossed in, I still don’t see many users being happy about this whole situation.
[via tmonews]

Since Android was introduced, there have been many complaints about its lack of .avi and .divx playback. Since then there has been a few phones with .divx capabilities but there still was no player for the rest of us. The RockPlayerBase allows any Android 2.1 handset to playback XviD, DivX, Mkv and even RMVB files. .